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Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

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Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#121

Post by spunker540 »

jerf wrote: post #117
gowld wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are speculating without evidence. Handwriting may be more effective for memorization than typing because forming letters by hand is a more memorable act than typing, nothing to do with "choosing what's important to write". Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more. You can test this yourself by making a fair comparision: * Copy entire documents by handw…

"Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more." A bit in undergrad but quite a lot in grad school, I ended up stopping taking notes. I discovered I was better off engaging completely in class, and consulting the textbooks if necessary, than trying to multitask learning and taking notes. YMMV; I can easily believe there are people who had the exact opposite exp…

I was the same way for the most part, I'd skip taking notes unless a teacher was making a very important point that I knew I wouldn't remember or wouldn't be able to look up later. But most of the time if it was important the teacher wouldn't just say it once and never touch on it again!

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#122

Post by felipeerias »

In my experience, a good strategy is to read your notes aloud, preferably while walking.

This forces you to really notice what is written, helps sustain your attention (when you're walking and talking, there's not much cognitive slack for drifting off), will improve your memory (we tend to remember things better when we have spent a larger effort on them), and leads pretty naturally to reason aloud about what you have just read.

Apparently, there used to be perambulatory monks that would follow a similar strategy, reading or reciting sacred texts while pacing around the courtyards of their monastery.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#123

Post by mujoco »

quadrangle wrote: post #49

My favorite "desirable difficulty" from cog psych is to practice recall . I recall a study with 3 groups of students: 1. read essay 4 times 2. read and take notes, study notes 3. read once, then have to write out (a few times) what can be recalled on a blank piece of paper The groups were from most to least confident in their learning but the actual success on a test for concepts (which requires recall) was opposite.…

Your method (3) is a great way to study, and it's very similar to the "Feynman Technique": https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-m...

The Feynman Technique is basically alternating between writing a description of a concept on paper from memory, and looking up whatever you couldn't remember.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#124

Post by JacobAldridge »

felipeerias wrote: post #122

In my experience, a good strategy is to read your notes aloud, preferably while walking. This forces you to really notice what is written, helps sustain your attention (when you're walking and talking, there's not much cognitive slack for drifting off), will improve your memory (we tend to remember things better when we have spent a larger effort on them), and leads pretty naturally to reason aloud about what you hav…

Interesting. I remember in high school history we'd often get the exam essay question to prepare. As a boarder, I used to break into one of the school classrooms, re-arrange all the furniture so the chairs formed a giant circle, and I'd pace around it memorising what I'd prepared.

I'm now wondering if the added chair-balance while walking enhanced the approach you're describing.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#125

Post by michaelkeenan »

kradroy wrote: post #119
michaelkeenan wrote: post #98

There was excitement when the first study showed hard-to-read fonts improved test performance in 2007[1]. Since then, there have been enough attempted replications for a 2015 review to conclude that there's no effect[2]. [1] Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning: http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003 [2] Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems: http://psycnet.ap…

Compelling, but the Sans Forgetica font's effect is focused on recall/remembering. From the two abstracts you linked (I'm not paying for the papers) it appears the experiments were testing the effect of disfluent fonts on reasoning. These are different cognitive activities, so it doesn't really disconfirm the font's creators' claims.

I just checked the review with Sci-Hub, and you are correct. I was much too hasty. The memory effect is still plausible, they write:

> "Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning." (my emphasis)

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#126

Post by michaelkeenan »

michaelkeenan wrote: post #98

There was excitement when the first study showed hard-to-read fonts improved test performance in 2007[1]. Since then, there have been enough attempted replications for a 2015 review to conclude that there's no effect[2]. [1] Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning: http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003 [2] Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems: http://psycnet.ap…

It's too late for me to edit this comment, but I was wrong to dismiss Sans Forgetica based on the review. I checked the paper and it notes:

> Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning.

Credit to kradroy for noting the discrepancy and prompting me to check. I regret the error :(

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#128

Post by regularfry »

gojomo wrote: post #46

I can't find it at the moment, but the last time I looked, attempted replications of an early "illegibility improves recall" study failed. (IIRC, that didn't use a custom font, but rather some de-contrasting/visual-noise applied.) I see no cited papers here, just the claim, in the video, that "over 100 students" were used in testing to pick this font from several candidates. I'm doubtful of any long-term value here.…

The type of illegibility matters, apparently. Decontrasting and visual noise stress a different part of the visual pathway to hard-to-read letter shapes. I'm trying to find the paper which describes this, but it's been at least a year since I saw it.

http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf reproduces the original effect. What's interesting here is that the effect is measured as significantly more pronounced in dyslexic students.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#130

Post by regularfry »

xte wrote: post #118
jessep wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you are joking or not. The point of the font is being terrible to read. There's an explanation on the page. Making your brain work harder to get the info makes it more likely to remember the info.

No it's not a joke, claiming that being harder to read help understanding things remind me the ancient Victorian era, the Cilicium idea, the "all work and no play" song etc. I do not consider it a scientific truth but only another reactionary claim that can be as scientific as Franklin idea of forcibly wake up people with a cannon shoot in any road.

http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf (to pick one example)

You may not know it, but there are studies backing this up. Whether you consider it a scientific truth or not is barely relevant. What is interesting to know is that not all disfluencies are created equal: blurring text and adding visual noise don't help, apparently because they don't engage the right part of the visual pathway.

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